Spit

My childhood was very eventful in an undesirable way. My father, though he did not reside with us, was extremely cruel and evil to my mother. For years my mother was under the medical care of a doctor for various conditions. She claims that the doctor would threaten to have her children taken from her if she did not keep her appointments. She would leave my brother and me with family members or close friends for months at a time and they would threaten to call the Department of Children and Family Services (DFACS) if she did not come and get my brother and me.

My brother had issues too. He is seven years older than me. He has epilepsy; he would have really bad seizures during his adolescent and teen years. He resented being bi-racial and struggled with being homosexual, which caused him major problems growing up in the 70s and 80s. I remember my mother having to pick him up from a youth home because a group of boys jumped him and wickedly beat him with a pool stick. I vividly remember the day I walked into my aunt's home and sitting there on the sofa was my brother with his bruised and swollen face. He also hated my father.

My mother once told me that the reason my brother hated my dad is that before I was born, my father gave my brother lots of love and attention, even though he was not my father's biological son. However, once I came along, all of that attention came to a halt. As soon as I arrived home from the hospital, my father brought a huge bag of things over for me and not one item in the bag was for my brother. Naturally, my brother was devastated.

Personally, I believe that both my mother and my brother resented me. My father never, not once, placed his hands on me nor disciplined me. Of course, as sweet as I was I never gave him a reason to. But he was an abusive man to my mother. Both my mother and brother would take off running out the back door when my father would appear at our home. I was so afraid, however, at that age, as early as four years old, I would pray to God for help while running to a neighbor's house crying and waiting for someone to come looking for me. I was only four when this began, or when I began to take notice.

Yes, they resented me. My brother was a mentally ill child and had reason to be. He would make me do horrible things that a child had no business doing, like pretending to marry one of the neighbor boys and making us lie down together in the cellar. The other children and I were only six or seven years of age, and though we did not physically touch each other, the stuff he and the other boys older sister had us doing was immoral. My brother would do these things and then use them against me, as if it were my idea.

He would manipulate me by threatening to tell our mother that I had done something wrong; he would  say things like "if you do not do this I will tell Maureen " and "if you do not do that I am going to tell her what you did." He would call me a "nigger" and "nigger toes" in front of my friends. One day he made me very angry. He was really riding me about cleaning up for him or something crazy he wanted me to do. He looked at me, standing there, six feet four inches tall, he looked down on me and spit in my face.

I was so very angry. I picked up a meat cleaver and threw it at him. The handle put a hole in the wall. I can visualize that hole in the wall today. My mother was and probably still is clueless to what I went through with him. She was only concerned with herself and him, my brother. Oh, and her dog, Dusty. One hot summer day, while I was outside playing with my friends, my mother came home and found her dog had hung himself on his chain. She walked up to me in front of the neighborhood kids, she was crying and she said to me "Dusty is dead" and then she slapped me right in my face. She then grabbed me by my hair and walked me all the way home, in front of everyone, just like she always did me when she was mad at the world. I was only ten or eleven years old. To this day, I do not know what I had to do with that dog's death.